On the beach

The city pledges that Lake Springfield Beach will be back one day, better than ever

Nearly 35 years ago, a young Frank Edwards stood
watch over Springfield Beach.

As one of the summertime
spot’s lifeguards, he surveyed activity in the pool — an
enclosed area about the size of two city blocks — and scrutinized
action on the high dive and slides. He watched hungry beach-goers flock to
the full-service café inside the beach house and the action-oriented
engage in sand-volleyball tournaments.

When Edwards remembers those days now, one thing
comes to mind: It was busy.

But after decades of poor attendance and
in-the-red budgets, the high dive and slides were disassembled. The
restaurant was shut down. And now, since City Water, Light & Power
announced in May that the beach would remain closed this summer, the
swimmers and sunbathers also have disappeared.

Edwards, who represents Ward 1 on the City Council,
immediately protested the decision. Removing the fun stuff that attracted
crowds to the beach, he says, led to lower turnouts.

“These things have been faded out and taken
away,” he says. “If you want attendance, you maintain, you add
to — you don’t take away.”

Todd Renfrow, CWLP’s general manager, agrees
and contends that the beach closure isn’t permanent. The public
utility, he says, plans to spend the next year evaluating and possibly
beefing up services for the 2009 season.

A look at the beach’s rough-and-tumble history
— from an almost total absence of profit in 73 years to an
unprecedented damage award and an unusual bacterial outbreak —
indicates that Springfieldians haven’t seen the demise of the
once-popular city institution quite yet.

In the beginning it was
called a “bathing” beach, its bathhouse “a model of
convenience.” Opened in July 1935, Lake Springfield Beach boasted
state-of-the-art powder rooms, shower areas, and a viewing veranda shaded
by overhead umbrellas. The cost of admission was 10 cents before 6 p.m. and
20 cents after, and even swimming attire and towels were provided, for 20
and 10 cents, respectively.

At the same time, other outdoor areas —
including fishing piers, public parks, and a wildlife sanctuary —
opened, putting Lake Springfield on the map as one of the nation’s
first water-supply reservoirs to allow recreational activities.

A few weeks later, a second bathing beach was opened,
this one on the south side of the lake, immediately east of Route 66, for
the “colored people.” Bridgeview Beach, as it was later named,
didn’t have the same amenities as Lake Park Beach; instead, a camp
building was converted into a beach house and a safety line was placed in
the water in lieu of a sea wall.

Juanita Barton, 83, remembers the days when her
family was turned away from the whites-only beach because of their skin
color. But the blacks-only beach wasn’t a safe haven from racists,
either. Before desegregation, many black residents were afraid to go to
Bridgeview Beach because police officers watched them swim and called them
names. Her family went anyway, but that ugly memory lingers.

“It’s not a five-minute experience,” she says, tearing
up. “It’s one that you live, and live, and live.”

Both beaches initially prospered, but by the early
1940s they had began to lose money. In 1953, a shortage of lifeguards
— most 18-year-olds were in the armed forces or employed at the time
— and funds threatened the beaches’ opening. According to
newspaper accounts, the expense of operating Lake Park Beach in 1952 was
$6,229.40, but revenue totaled just $4,998.53. Bridgeview Beach’s
figures were more dismal still, with operating expenses at $1,002.58 and
incoming revenue a mere $80.03.

The murky financial situation worsened in the
’50s. The 1953 operation of both beaches resulted in a nearly $18,000
loss for CWLP; coincidentally, the beaches were closed the next season
because of low lake levels. After two idle years and additional expenses
for their revival, Lake Park Beach and Bridgeview Beach were visited by
more than 61,000 people but incurred a $12,000 loss.

Over the next 20 years city officials publicized
weekend bus service from downtown to Lake Park Beach, created family season
tickets and “family swim days,” reduced adult admission fees
from 50 to 25 cents after 6 p.m., offered free swim and lifesaving lessons,
inaugurated free beach days, and chlorinated the beach pool, all in the
hope of encouraging attendance and boosting revenue.

At first these efforts met with little success. In June 1972, the city termed Bridgeview Beach a
“money loser” and announced that it would be closed. The beach
— which had been desegregated since 1952 — cost more than
$37,000 to operate during 1971 but only raked in $286 in admission fees.
Lake Park Beach was kept open, even though it experienced a greater loss.
It cost more than $78,000 to operate but only earned $16,146.

The real deal-breaker for Lake Park Beach may have
been a lawsuit filed by a man named Robert Shermanof Oak Ridge, Tenn. Sherman claimed
that his 17-year-old son William struck an exposed pipe when he dived into
the water at the beach in June 1964. He was permanently paralyzed from the
chest down. In January 1968, Sherman sued the city for $1
million, and the jury returned what was then the largest judgment in the
history of Sangamon County — $319,000. The City Council appealed the
next year, but the appellate court upheld the jury’s decision.

Although Lake Springfield Beach is closed for the year, the beach house is still available for private-party rentals.

PHOTO BY DAVE JANES

It might’ve been the closure of Bridgeview
Beach, publicity for Lake Park Beach, or people staying in town to save
money, but, whatever the reason, city officials noted that things started
to look up in 1973. Attendance increased by 35 percent and continued to
climb. In 1975 more than 20,000 beachgoers hit the waves, and by the first
month in 1976 more than 12,000 had already traveled through the gates at
the newly rechristened Lake Springfield Beach.

After so many years of wear and tear, CWLP decided to
renovate the Lake Springfield beach house for the first time since its
opening. The 40-year-old structure no longer met city electrical and
plumbing codes, needed mechanical and aesthetic updates, and required
replacement of the pool’s chlorination system.

In February 1977 the City Council filed two
ordinances that would bring both the Lake Springfield beach house and the
former Bridgeview Beach area — now a campground — into
compliance with state health standards. The council hired Brown Engineers
for $35,000 to design renovation plans for the Lake Springfield beach house
and requested $320,000 in federal grants to finance the full project. Ralph
Hahn & Associates was hired for $15,600 to design plans for the
Bridgeview area; the company’s primary goal was to get new water and
sewer lines to keep campers from dumping waste into the lake.

Even though CWLP hadn’t received final word on
the grants, according to newspaper accounts, the utility let contracts for
the projects and scheduled the completion date for the following summer.
The city ran into trouble in October, when the Department of Housing and
Urban Development refused to release the funds, stating that the project
didn’t meet grant guidelines. After a site inspection, HUD concluded
that Lake Springfield Beach was too far from the city to benefit low- and
moderate-income families.

City officials argued that the project had received
tentative approval in June, but HUD maintained that the city had erred in
letting a contract to Alzina Construction Co. in September, before the site
inspection or the funds release. After considerable public outcry and the
city’s threat to sue, HUD reversed its decision in November,
conceding that a four-month wait on the decision was beyond the legal
limit.

When the Lake Springfield Beach project was finished,
in 1978, city officials hailed its new structure and chlorination system,
which they said gave the water a “cleaner, greener appearance.”
The area’s new façade seemed to produce
additional interest; nearly 18,000 patrons used the facility during its
first month of service.

Lake Springfield Beach
has continued on its rocky road over the past 10 years, persevering as one
of the area’s oldest summertime destinations.

In
1998, after the annual Ironhorse Triathlon, at least 98 competitors and
another 248 recreational lake users came down with the flulike symptoms of
leptospirosis — a disease caused by a bacterium that is normally
excreted in the urine of animals and found in tropical waters. At the time
it was the largest epidemic of its kind in U.S. history, but researchers
and doctors had trouble pinpointing a cause. Some blamed sewage or farm
animals around the lake; others were convinced that sewer rats had ignited
the outbreak.

Lake Park Beach, in 1938

In an unprecedented move, CWLP restricted swimming in
the lake and closed the beach for the season. The utility began testing for
Escherichia coli
bacteria, another waterborne cause of disease, every four days at different
locations around the lake. The Illinois Department of Public Health
recommended closing Lake Springfield Beach when E. coli levels were higher than 235
cfu (colony forming units) per 100 milliliters of water, which has occurred
regularly since 1998.

In June 2001, readings at one end of the lake soared
to 6,010, and in May and June 2002 they were still as high as 2,419. Since
the summer of 2005 the beach has been closed at least five days each season
as a result of bad water samples. The utility maintains that increases in
the E. coli count
are a result of heavy rains that wash bacteria from the land into the lake.

Although the beach was still popular into the late
’90s, attendance and revenue began declining in the next decade.
After Mayor Tim Davlin took office, in 2003,Renfrow received permission from the City Council to
operate the beach independently and made the decision to stop charging
admission. The move, coupled with promotions and the reinstatement of a
food vendor, revitalized Lake Springfield Beach for the season. In 2004 the
beach had just over 4,000 swimmers, but 2005 brought more than 20,000.

Jeremy Bonnett, program director at the Nelson
Center, began taking summer camp groups to Lake Springfield Beach shortly
after he started at the center in 2000. Even though Nelson Center has its
own pool and the kids could swim everyday, he says, it was beneficial for
them to get out of the facility and go to the park for a day.

“It was a fun change for kids to go somewhere
else,” Bonnett says.

But things began to go downhill in 2006 and in July
2007, after 16-year-old Eric Jones drowned, the utility closed the beach
early. In May, after the utility investigated bacteria counts, attendance
figures, and the necessary facility repairs, Renfrow says, it seemed to be
in the best interest of the city to go without Lake Springfield Beach for
one more year.

“I think this year would have been a disaster,
quite frankly, with all of the storms we had,” Renfrow said.
“There would be hardly any day up until now that we’d be
open.”

CWLP is discussing several improvements, including
removal of the sea wall. Renfrow says it’s a toss-up: If the sea wall
is taken down, the utility won’t need to chlorinate, but the lack of
a sea wall could pose a safety issue. Boats tend to come in close to the
beach, he explains, and the sea wall protects swimmers; a buoy line might
not suffice.

There’s also talk of establishing a
swim-at-your-own risk policy instead of employing lifeguards. As far as he
knows, Renfrow says, Lake Springfield Beach is one of the only public
facilities in Illinois that’s enclosed and also one of the few
staffed by lifeguards.

Other ideas in the works include reestablishing bus
transportation so that more Springfieldians can travel to the beach without
worrying about the cost of gas and ridding the area of pesky geese that
sully the sand and water.

“We are going to take the opportunity this year
to step back, see what it needs, and make the repairs,” Renfrow says,
“then we’re going to look for make-or-break next year. We have
to see whether it’s going to be used.”

Despite CWLP’s reasoning, Edwards and several
other aldermen were upset with the decision, especially since the water
department recently passed an 80.2 percent rate increase and the idea of
closing the beach didn’t surface during budget discussions.

“I think if we had this discussion during the
budget cycle instead of after the budget cycle,” Edwards says,
“the beach wouldn’t be closed today. The aldermen
would’ve said that it’s unacceptable.”

Edwards calls the closure of the beach a
“quality-of-life issue.” As gas prices continue to increase,
area residents are staying closer to home and deserve inexpensive, outdoor
activities. Not everyone can afford to join a lake club, he says, and the
beach offers a facility for recreation that, in essence, Springfieldians
fund.

Ward 2 Ald. Gail Simpson, another proponent of
reopening the beach, says she understands the need to make repairs and keep
people safe but still feels that the issue shouldn’t be put to rest.

She says, “I don’t want anything to put
the city in jeopardy — we can ill afford to pay any lawsuits —
but we need to find a way to open up the beach, if only for a couple of
days a week, or something.”

Although Lake Springfield Beach is closed to the
public, the beach house can still be rented for private parties. The
current rental and cleanup fees are much lower than others in the area,
Renfrow says, so an additional change might involve increasing the fees to
boost revenue.

Improvements to the beach will be funded in the
fiscal year 2010 budget, he says. Historical information was provided by the Sangamon
Valley Collection of Lincoln Library.